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We’ve all been there: you’re building a chat experience and end up spending way too much time on UI glue - message bubbles, room lists, typing indicators… all before you even get to the good part: real-time logic. So today, we’re launching a set of lightweight, flexible UI components built for React and powered by Ably Chat.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Message Reactions in Ably Chat - a quintessential part of any modern chat experience, now available as a native feature. How message reactions work Each reaction in Ably Chat is defined by a simple string, often a UTF-8 emoji like , but it could also be a tag (:like:) or text (+1). Reactions are aggregated in realtime based on their name.

In-app chat has gone from a nice-to-have to an essential product feature across gaming, SaaS, social, and live streaming apps. While it’s tempting to treat it as “just another feature,” the reality is that building chat touches nearly every layer of your stack - from low-latency delivery and message ordering to presence, typing indicators, moderation. And then there is operating at scale to consider.

This post will walk through the creation of a realtime chat application with Next.js and deploying it to Netlify.

In any chat experience, creating a safe and welcoming environment is just as important as delivering messages in realtime. As online interactions scale, the need for effective moderation becomes essential, not only to protect users, but to maintain trust, foster community, and support healthy growth.

Long polling and WebSockets are two common techniques for delivering realtime data. While both have been used successfully in production systems, they differ significantly in how they perform, scale, and integrate into modern architectures. This guide compares long polling vs WebSockets to help engineering teams and technical decision-makers choose the right approach for delivering realtime experiences reliably and at scale.

We’re excited to announce Ably LiveObjects, launched with a radical vision: to enable any application to work with live, shared data that synchronizes instantly for users everywhere. Shared access to live data is no longer a nice-to-have - it’s becoming a foundational building block of every realtime digital experience.

Not every message in a realtime app needs to be available in message history, like in the rewind backlog or in persistent storage. Ably is introducing ephemeral messages to let you deliver transient updates - like reactions, typing indicators, or cursor positions - which are only delivered to clients that are connected at the moment the message is published.

As your user base expands, so does the volume and variety of push notifications you need to send. Whether it’s transactional alerts, updates, or personalized messages, publishing notifications for thousands - or even millions - of users can quickly become a bottleneck. The more you grow, the more important it becomes to have a scalable, efficient push strategy.

At Ably's February fan engagement event, Sam Renouf, CEO of the Professional Triathletes Organisation (PTO), captured the essence of impactful fan engagement with an observation about motorsports: Sam's insight points to a transformation across sports, and fan experiences more generally: that effective engagement now depends on meaningful realtime data storytelling.